Watching Stalin Maneuver Between Hitler and the West: American Diplomats and Soviet Diplomacy, 1934?1939

Abstract

Early in October 1937, Assistant Secretary of State George S. Messersmith recommended that the United States actively oppose Germany, Italy and Japan. America was the “ultimate object of the powers groups in this new system of force and lawlessness,” Messersmith warned Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. If Washington did not quickly form a coalition with the European powers against the aggressors, Washington would eventually find itself standing alone for the European democracies “will have been cleared out of the way.” Messersmith also favored cooperation with the Soviet Union despite his belief that communism and fascism were “equally dangerous.” If the Western powers quickly stopped Hitler, Messersmith argued, they would have enough strength to stop the Soviet Union “if Moscow gets strong enough to carry out her ultimate objectives.”1 Most American diplomats rejected Messersmith's recommendations, especially his advocacy of cooperation with the Soviet Union. Throughout the thirties, American diplomats who watched Joseph Stalin maneuver between Nazi Germany and the Western powers retained a strong suspicion about Stalin's tactics and objectives. This essay will examine the sources and nature of the evaluations of Soviet diplomacy made by American officials and the impact of their assessments on Roosevelt's Russian policies and their own long term attitudes toward Soviet diplomacy. Despite a general difference in assessment of Soviet policy between Soviet experts who increasingly emphasized the dominance of nationalistic self-interest and other officials who stressed the importance of Marxist-Leninist ideology, most officials believed that the Kremlin's commitment to eventual communist expansion discredited current policies and made the Soviet Union unacceptable as a potential ally. Since Russian specialists were suspicious of Stalin's objectives, they accurately recognized the ambiguity in Soviet policy, most notably the Kremlin's mixture of efforts to cooperate with the Western powers against Nazi Germany with secret approaches to Hitler. Yet American diplomats underestimated the importance of Stalin's overtures to the West and the potential benefits in the encouragement of this dimension of Soviet diplomacy if only to keep Stalin away from Hitler.